While on one of our regular trips to New York City to visit our daughter, my wife and I went with her to the world premiere of our friend Rob Epstein's new documentary about the 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist live performance of
Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music.
The biggest challenge for Rob and his co-director Jeffery Friedman was to take the hundreds of hours of footage from this one-time-only 24-hour performance during which Mac sang 246 songs, covering the span of American history from 1776 to 2016, and somehow condense it into two hours while still conveying the thought-provoking beauty of this unique performance. The film is currently wrapping up a short tour of large screens before premiering in its permanent home on HBO Max where it will be available for streaming as of June 27.
Going in, all I knew about Taylor Mac was that he is a well-regarded NYC actor, playwright, performance artist, director, producer, and singer-songwriter who has won numerous prizes and honors throughout his career including a MacArthur Genius Grant. Most people, however, would probably first and foremost label him as a drag queen. I also knew going in that he uses the word judy as a gender pronoun. I was going to have the opportunity to meet him after the premier and even practiced using judy, but found that everyone else, including his spouse, was using the traditional male pronouns, so that's what I did.
If what you've read so far plugs you in, I'm assuming you'll skip the documentary, although I urge you not to because you'll miss out on something extraordinary.
History, they say, is told by the winners. And it's true to the extent that most of us learn the stories as told from the perspective of the majority, which in the case of American history tends to be white, male, and straight. As a straight, white male, I've seen myself at the center of the American story for most of my life, but for the past few decades I've found myself craving every alternative perspective I can get my hands on. American history as told from the perspective of a Native American tells different stories in different ways than the ones I grew up with. Black and brown people show me stories through perspectives that have always been there but are new to me. The stories told by women bring yet more depth and, again, perspective. The perspective presented by Taylor Mac is an unapologetically queer one. His choice to present it through the history of popular music, starting with Yankee Doodle Dandy (which we learn was originally sung by the British as an gay-slur insult to American soldiers), shows us that much of our history's beauty and horror has always hidden in plain sight (or sound) through songs we've known and loved.
As Mac sang a popular sea chanty from the early 1800's, a song about the teamwork of hoisting a sail, we see the beauty of Americans pulling together to get things done. When he pauses to explain that the lyrics tell us that when they are done they will go together to rape enslaved women, we are crushed by the causal horror with which many of our fellow Americans have always lived. I was reminded of the song Jump Jim Joe that we sang for years in preschool, not knowing its history in racist minstrel shows during the 1820's. When I learned this historical fact about our beloved song, one that I'd sometimes referred to as our school's anthem, I was at first reluctant to stop singing it. After all, the children didn't know. But now I knew and knowing meant it had to go. Mac says to his audience that he understands why someone might not want to give up something, anything, that builds community and brings people together. "I get it," he says. But when the core of that unity is "evil" we are morally obliged to rid ourselves of it.
This is exactly why I crave new perspectives, not just on history, but everything. The older I get, the more I understand that my understanding of the world, even things that I felt were firmly established, is always incomplete. There is always another perspective. As an Ojibwe educator named Hopi Martin once told me, even if you've talked with all the humans, you then have to start asking the animals and plants.
I was recently accused of "indoctrinating" children: first by an insulting neighbor, then, after posting here about it, by "readers" who may or may not have actually read my post about it. The basic gist of their collective objections was that, as parents, they and only they had the right to decide what, when, and how their children should be exposed to history, gender, sexuality, and race. In other words, they objected to the very idea of offering their children any perspective other than their own.
I get it.
The perspectives of people who experience the world in ways other than we do force us to rethink everything, even some of the things we hold sacred. That can be upsetting, frightening, and, perhaps most importantly, it can make us feel that the things that hold our beloved community together are being threatened. It's upsetting to learn that our anthems are rooted in evil. The state song of Kentucky, as Mac tells us, originally included the racial slur "darkies." It was only changed, after a great deal of controversy, to "people" in the 1970's. People of Kentucky, that cosmetic change does not erase the evil.
But I get it. Allowing ourselves to see through the eyes of others always contains the prospect of transforming our world in both large and small ways. That can obviously be upsetting. No one wants to be shown their own evil, but true evil, I've found, comes from knowing better and not doing better. My discovery, however, is that most of what I learn from exposing myself to new perspectives does not take anything away from me, but rather adds to, and even multiplies, me. To put it selfishly, the more perspectives I collect, the bigger I become.
Viewing Taylor Mac's masterpiece as condensed for the screen in this documentary, caused me to squirm at times. I didn't always like how it made me feel. But it did make me bigger, which is what education is always all about. As the author Doris Lessing wrote, "People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself." In other words, our strongest defense against being indoctrinated, which is to say avoid being trapped by one narrow perspective, is to get out there, collect perspectives, and think for ourselves. The more perspectives we've understood, the easier it is to think for ourselves. No one possesses the whole truth, but together, sharing and listening, we might be able to come close.
I cried during my viewing of the documentary of Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music. It overwhelmed me as Mac urged the entire live audience of some 600 people to engage in a slow-motion fist fight with one another. It was both painful and joyful to see all those people, strangers brought together for a 24-hour theater experience, going through the motions of a fistfight, slapping, punching, and kicking, while simultaneously smiling, laughing, and creating. Together.
To quote Lessing again, "That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way."
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If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! "Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices
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